This
is Bloor Street, just west of Spadina, in the summer of 1933. By then,
it already been about 50 years since the Annex was annexed into the city
of Toronto. But the growth hadn't stopped there, of course. By the time
the 1920s rolled around, the city had begun to swallow up villages and
neighbourhoods even further north, spreading up the escarpment
into places like Moore Park and Forest Hill, and west too, through
Parkdale. That's when we decided that our transportation system should
be amalgamated as well: the TTC was officially born and a brand new
fleet of streetcars hit the roads of Toronto.

You
can see them here in the middle of the photo. They're called Peter Witt
streetcars, named after the guy from Cleveland who designed them in the
early 1900s. We had a few hundred of them, which apparently makes us
one of their best-known homes, but they also appeared in cities all over
North America and Europe: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Mexico City,
Madrid, Naples, Milan... The TTC used them for about forty years,
finally taking the last ones out of commission in the '60s, but in
Milan, they are still about two hundred Peter Witt streetcars gliding
through the streets, painted bright orange. A few of them have even made
their way from Milan to the United States, where they grace the hills
of San Francisco.

Here are a few more photos of the Peter Witts. (You can find even more here, read more about the streetcars on Transit Torontohere or in Agatha Barc's blogTO post here. You can also watch a little video of one of the streetcars in action here from the Halton County Radial Railway Museum, where they've got one you can ride.)

This post originally appeared on the Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog,which tells stories about the history of Toronto. You can read more highlights from it here, or visit it yourself here.